Knot In Time

elizabitchtaylor: Joan Chen as Josie Packard in promotional...

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 23:54:08 +0100

elizabitchtaylor:

Joan Chen as Josie Packard in promotional photos for the first season of Twin Peaks, 1990.

grace-morgan-art: Guys, just be cool.

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 23:51:48 +0100

grace-morgan-art:

Guys, just be cool.

Photo

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 23:51:11 +0100

theelectricrelaxation: futurastic: UNLOCKING THE TRUTH “Kriss...

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 23:12:18 +0100

theelectricrelaxation:

futurastic:

UNLOCKING THE TRUTH “Kriss Kross this isn’t. Lock up your daughters, America: these sixth-grade metalheads from Flatbush, Brooklyn are on a mission to rock your socks off.”

i feel it

A BAD BITCHES FROM SRI LANKA MET MAYA WHEN FILMING IN LDN FOR...

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 22:47:16 +0100

BAD BITCHES FROM SRI LANKA

MET MAYA WHEN FILMING IN LDN FOR #BTN

sfilate: Jourdan Dunn in Fashion DJs directed by Nick...

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 22:36:52 +0100

sfilate:

Jourdan Dunn in Fashion DJs directed by Nick Knight

An excellent pair of antlers.

swagchat: haliebrooke99: swagchat: man salads are the best thing in the world Man, salads no...

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 22:22:27 +0100

swagchat:

haliebrooke99:

swagchat:

man salads are the best thing in the world

Man, salads

no man salads

Photo

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 22:21:42 +0100

sluteverbabe: how i wanna spend my life

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 22:11:32 +0100

sluteverbabe:

how i wanna spend my life

architectureland: Echolilia: A Father’s Photographic...

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 22:11:11 +0100

architectureland:

Echolilia: A Father’s Photographic Conversation with His Autistic Son. Timothy Archibald uses his camera to find an emotional bridge to his son Photographs and text from the book Echolilia: Sometimes I Wonder

My eldest son was born in 2001. He was always a kid who went to the beat of his own drummer. When he was 5, we began making photographs collaboratively as a way to find some common ground and attempt to understand each other. Soon after we began the project, Elijah was diagnosed on the autistic spectrum. Though the diagnosis gave me the words and history to understand my son better, it didn’t take away the mystery and the need to try to find an emotional bridge to him.”Echolilia” is an alternate spelling of a more common term, “echolalia,” used in the autistic community to refer to the habit of verbal repetition and copying that is commonly found in autistic kids’ behavior. I liked the idea of it: photography is a form of copying. Kids are a form of repetition. And looking at my kid with photography allowed me to see myself a new

What Happens to Women Who Are Denied Abortions?

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 22:10:42 +0100

What Happens to Women Who Are Denied Abortions?:

fem-blog:

A study that explores abortion’s impact by looking at women who get to the clinic too late.

buttyholly: ❋ ❋ ❋

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 22:13:22 +0100

buttyholly:

❋ ❋ ❋

galasai: Selected works of Chad Wys Opus 2, 2012 Arrangement in...

Fri, 14 Jun 2013 19:39:41 +0100

galasai:

Selected works of Chad Wys

Opus 2, 2012

Arrangement in Skintones 9, 2011

Arrangement in Skintones 8, 2011

A 1940s tennis dress on display at the V&A museum. Wimbledon...

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 10:58:00 +0100

A 1940s tennis dress on display at the V&A museum. Wimbledon is so very nearly upon us :D

smallatomicbomb: Amy Poehler, Annie Clark, Carrie Brownstein...

Mon, 10 Jun 2013 19:23:05 +0100

smallatomicbomb:

Amy Poehler, Annie Clark, Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen at the 2013 White House Correspondents Dinner Vanity Fair Party.

Photo by: Matt Roth

This is the very definition of #Awesome People Hanging Out Together

Growing Up Brown: Desexualized and Hyper-sexualized

Mon, 10 Jun 2013 19:20:09 +0100

I’m always surprised by the way I look. Sometimes I look down and notice that my thighs are taking up much more space than I would like. Or sometimes I glance at myself in the mirror and realize that my arms are fuller and rounder than I expected. I don’t expect to look like myself. I expect to look like other girls, girls who are on TV and in magazines, girls who people call ‘beautiful.’ I don’t want to look like them—not outwardly, at least. I tell myself I don’t care if I’m not ‘beautiful.’ But then I’m caught off-guard every once in a while when I catch a glimpse of myself somewhere and realize that I do not look like anyone in the movies. I’m so much messier, my broad nose spilling over my cheeks when I smile. I’m so much bigger.

Chaya Babu recently published an article on the Feminist Wire called Walking the Tightrope: Good Indian Girls, Race, and Bad Sexuality. As a Muslim and a second-generation Pakistani-American immigrant, a lot of what she said stuck with me, especially a paragraph describing her experience in high school:

“Women of color were mostly unseen as partner options. And if we landed in the purview somehow, it was, at best, to be mentioned as perhaps pretty and then quickly dismissed (you know, the “Wow, you’re pretty for an Indian girl” line) or, at worst, to be ridiculed for our ugliness. This may sound extreme, but it’s the reality I lived. I undoubtedly stood out in this context – ashy knees in the winter, unruly mane of thick, black hair in a sea of pale midriffs and near-ubiquitous gold or platinum highlights – but I was also invisible. And that external gaze is powerful: the invisibility desexualized me.”

Like Babu, in high school I stood by resentfully while watching other girls—white girls, pretty girls—flirting with boys and going out to dances and dating. I was conscious of my scarred brown thighs, my rounded face, my bony ankles and my wide hips. I overthought my limbs, my frizzy hair, my soft tummy. I was taking up too much space, but at the same time no one seemed to see me.

While other girls wore cutoffs and took photos in bikinis at the beach, I begged my mom to let me wear a swimsuit. She finally acquiesced, buying me the sort of one-piece designed for middle-aged women, and insisted that I wear it only at all-girls pool parties. I agreed, but immediately broke my promise. In high school in America, there are no all-girls pool parties (or hardly any).

Still, I felt self-conscious in my swimsuits, in my short-shorts: what did people think of the lines along the inside of my thighs? Was my unruly stomach rumpling and sagging? Worse, was wearing a swimsuit somehow immoral, indecent? I felt guilty when I caught men glancing at my skinny brown legs.

There’s still always the sense of someone watching. Growing up a brown Muslim girl in the United States is almost paradoxical: you are at the same time desexualized and hypersexualized. At school, like Babu, I was the desexualized Other: everyone knew I didn’t date or drink or hook up. I wasn’t a girl in the sense that everyone wanted to be a girl: I wasn’t an object of desire. I didn’t fit into the space outlined for desirable girls; I could not stuff my body—my big hips and my big hair—into that space. At home, however, I am hypersexualized, albeit indirectly. My immediate family is not very religious, but my mom is constantly telling me to wear a scarf over my cleavage or to pull my top down over my stomach. I can’t go to the beach with my family because I’m not allowed to wear a swimsuit in front of my father. Whenever I’m with my extended family, I am reproached for wearing sleeveless tops, or for bending over so that my shirt billows out and my bra is visible. At family gatherings, I have to wear long tunics that cover my backside and tops that cover my shoulders.

Even now, my body—lanky and lumpy as it may be—is a site of awkward and unwanted sexuality. My bra-strap sometimes ignites contempt; the slip of skin between the hem of my shirt and the top of my pants can be illicit and wrong. When I wear clothing that is baggy, I feel that my body is cumbersome and ungainly. When I wear clothing that is fitted or cropped, my body is rebellious, squeezing through the cracks, attracting glances I’m not sure I want or understand.

As I came of age in high school I was invisible, undesirable; hardly a sexual being in any context. Even now at college, it’s difficult for me to exercise sexual agency. I get embarrassed asking for what I want. I’m not sure if I’m comfortable asking for what I want. I don’t know what I want. I don’t feel like I have control over my body or my sexuality.

I think that all brown girls—especially Muslim girls—go through this. You don’t look exactly right. You don’t fit in; you’re awkwardly getting by, squeezing through the cracks, the same way your ass is squeezing out of the back of the two-piece swimsuit your mom wouldn’t let you buy. You take up more space than you would like—your fleshy armpit that you need to cover up, the flash of disruptive cleavage—but at the same time you are invisible. You’re not feminine, or at least not in a culture where femininity is tied to very specific standards of desirability and ‘beauty.’ You’re not beautiful, you’re not desirable, but at the same time you’re somehow overly sexual. It’s a feeling of helplessness and frustration. You are shocked, appalled, and disappointed with your own body. You don’t have any power over your body—it does what it likes. Sexuality does not originate from your body, but the possibility of strange men’s sexuality is constantly in your mind, policing what you wear and how you perceive yourself.

Today, even if a top makes my boobs look bigger than I would like, I wear it. I wear cutoff shorts if I want to. I wear bathing suits at the beach and I try to rule out what anyone else is thinking when they look at me. I don’t tell my mom about everything I do, but I do what I want. When I see myself in the mirror and feel that familiar pang of dissatisfaction—of being not-quite-right; of inhabiting a foreign body—I look away.

Zoya Haroon [feminspire]

catladysoul: Whenever someone asks me for recommendations on...

Mon, 10 Jun 2013 14:42:53 +0100

catladysoul:

Whenever someone asks me for recommendations on books to read about feminism that is not RIOT GRRRL IS EVERYTHING 5EVER I recommend this book first. I wish tumblr search was easier to do, because when I first read through it I talked about each chapter in depth on tumblr and it’s totally lost in the abyss. It’s a great primer to movements NOT focused on riot grrrl culture and a very easy and interesting read, which isn’t easy considering sometimes Gender Studies books can be dry as fuck.

nevver: Kafka

Mon, 10 Jun 2013 12:42:27 +0100

nevver:

Kafka

victongai: Mayfly Victo Ngai A full page illustration is for...

Mon, 10 Jun 2013 01:09:11 +0100

victongai:

Mayfly

Victo Ngai

A full page illustration is for the last New Yorker fiction “Mayfly” by Kevin Canty.

Big thanks to AD Jordan Awan who suggested that we could create an edge to edge butterfly piece focusing on the first paragraph of the story: “Driving across the Utah desert on I‐70, James hit a butterfly with his car. Then another. Then a shower of them, hitting the windshield like hail, wings trapped in the wipers, orange and black. The noise of them, muted but steady, woke Molly from her trance, and she looked out the windshield, at broken wings and yellow smears.”

You can read the process post on my drawger.

I like that I get to draw more these days.

Sat, 08 Jun 2013 20:02:00 +0100

I like that I get to draw more these days.